Thursday, February 10, 2011

UPDATE: Just so there is a understandable context of tongue firmly placed in cheek please keep in mind that I don't believe in athiests.

I want to take us away to a magical place, where people read headlines like this:

“Finally, Pope Benadict the XVI has admitted that the Catholic churches recent, shameless and transparent attempts at declaring some form of ‘bankruptcy’ are actually well played economical maneuvers. By shuffling around expenses and equity, the church turns old properties into husks, claiming they cannot sustain themselves. The reason? So they can avoid paying out to settlements for those that have sued them over abuse scandals resulting because of ‘a few bad apples’. Additionally, Pope Benadict has offered a full apology to those that suffered in the scandal as well as declaring dogmatic law too be fallible, but only after he declared everyone was going to “the good place that is run by the guy with the beard, not the bad one run by the S&M weirdo whose into horns”. Also, every Bishop, Cardinal, Pope, Zombie Pope and even those who have titles we do not understand but are still somehow involved with heaven, they all apologized for sodomizing those little children as well. Although there were some requests, in meaning of full disclosure, to point out that not all these men of power sodomized the children; some of them just received a good tug job after morning mass.”

That’s the way the Catholic church should be addressed, but certain people love to dance around the group, like its some good organization. Well, if its good, there must be some kind of good coming out of it. So lets look at a recent request made by the Pope to make this kind of good happen, which is the kind of good you feel when your at a beach party in 1967: “Use new media to bring the gift of god.” Now is a good time to read that sentence because get a load of this one that’s coming up.

I just heard about “Confession: A Roman Catholic App”, available for only $1.99, is receiving the blessing of a Catholic bishop, also known as imprimatur. Inspired by some morons at the Little iApps ‘company’ (i.e. a dorky middle aged man hoping for success by operating a business inside his garage), this text only ‘application’ starts out by telling you some old commandments that were originally destroyed and rewritten by the local stuttering lunatic (it’s true; Moses could hardly say his own name and he rewrote the ten commandments once he came down and saw how his list was passe’; it included no notation about false idols. But there were golden calves fucking everywhere! Which leads me to, why golden calves? I mean, what the fuck? If your going to worship any animal in the desert, or any four legged beast for that matter, go with the camel. I imagine that the efficient way a camel lives off small amounts of water would be the animal one should worship. But a cow, who lives off grass by the way, in a desert? Golden?). Equally as dumb is the price tag; seemingly nothing, all the ‘application’ includes are blocks of text and a few questions for you to answer. After you get through learning what everyone knows when they walk past a municipal courthouse in the south (‘See Cletus, aint nuffin on that slab there bout nnncest!’), this application displays some questions, asking the user to answer it in an attempt to pinpoint your sin. After you answer some questions, an inspiration message appears, offering words of encouragement as well as advice that helps one look to god. Well, the Roman Catholic god. Remember, it’s ‘A Roman Catholic App”, so I don’t think anyone else is really allowed to use it. It’s a special app, like the digital New Testament that everyone finds left in their hotel room on a thumb stick. Don’t you hate those? You think you found your old stop motion animation project that took you two months, but its just the fucking gospel.

So what’s so nefarious about this application? Well, if it now has the blessing of the church, or getting it, that means we are only closing the gap of an eventual substitute for confession. The creators and the bishop both say they want people to go to confession. Well, if that’s the case, why create such convenient ‘applications’ (remember its just a series of questions followed with a few predetermined lines of text) like this?! And consider the eventual fallout from those tech savvy types. Imagine…

Everyone loves to sync their devices; every PC user hates it when some Mac guy says they love apple because they can use your iPhone or iTouch to flush their iToilet or control media on their iMac. You can sync kindle programs so that when your reading a book on your cell phone it puts your kindle and pc on the same page. What I’m getting at is social networking through GPS and syncing of devices. Lets say you use your Facebook account that is also shared with Loopt that publicly shows your position and updates when you go to any business. Then, you have one of your friends or some script kiddy who already has the tools set up your iPhone to automatically generate messages based on what locations you enter. For example, if you enter ‘The Village Pub’ your iPhone will automatically update Loopt, Facebook and GPS, letting everyone know a predetermined messaged based on the GPS coordinates. So, imagine walking into ‘The Village Pub’ and having your iPhone say ‘Hey I’m in the village pub” on Twitter and Loopt and Facebook.

This is where the real fear starts. Now imagine syncing these responses to the Confession application. Now you have a phone that, as long as it is on and has a signal, will automatically run the Confess program (for Roman Catholics) depending on what your doing. For example, “Hi. I am at the Village Pub sinning. Specifically, drinking, because it’s a pub. I may also be doing cocaine in the bathroom.” At this point, the phone runs the Confess app, automatically, and parses through the questions accordingly. Halleluiah! The Roman Catholic is now allowed to sin with automatic redemption, and only for $1.99. You know, all of a sudden, that doesn’t seem like to bad a price point. Good job, Little iApps!